Sense of Destiny

Williamsburg Bridge

"The thing you have to understand about New Yorkers is that they tend to have a sense of destiny. By dint of their location they think they are invincible, indestructible. Impervious to pretty much anything and everything you care to throw at them."
Dylan Jones, The Biographical Dictionary of Popular Music

Midwest

"New Yorkers panic if anything about the Midwest comes into conversation, because one, they don't know anything about it and, two, they're not absolutely sure where it is."
Garrison Keillor, Wobegon Boy

Detox

Store on Third Avenue

"If you get New Yorkers out of the city for two weeks to detox, they are like everybody else."
Pat Schroeder, The 2,548 Wittiest Things Anybody Ever Said

Worst Dressed

Williamsburg

"New York is the worst-dressed rich city in the world. There is an inexplicable lost connection between the countless clothes shops, sophisticated, expensive, modern, classic, amused, serious, postmodern, and vintage, and the stuff, the schmutter that people actually put on in the morning. It's a city where the rich dress worse than the poor."
A.A. Gill, To America With Love

On the Go

Sixth Avenue

"That is what New Yorkers are like, always on the go, always trying to get ahead of one another. And they do it all with a kind of dignity.They dress well, live high if sometimes wildly, and do not flinch from the most foolhardy speculations."
Knut Hamsun, Knut Hamsun Remembers America

Who is a New Yorker

Midtown Manhattan (Pixabay)

"A New Yorker is someone who knows how to walk from Fifth Avenue and 50th Street to Sixth Avenue and 47th Street in a heavy rainstorm without getting wet."
Ralph Caplan, Cracking the Whip: Essays on Design and Its Side Effects

Lay it on the Line

Store on Fifth Avenue

"New Yorkers don't hold anything back—sitting in traffic or just walking down the street, we lay it on the line, and we don't whisper when we do it."
John McEnroe, You Cannot Be Serious

Feeling of Death

St. Paul's Churchyard

"Maybe New Yorkers like black because they feel like they've died."
Candace Bushnell, Summer and the City

Survivors

Long Island City

"New Yorkers, being New Yorkers, love survivors."
Dolly Carlisle, Ragged but Right

Commonplace Beauty

"New York is the kind of place where beauty is so commonplace, so taken for granted, that people don't look anymore like they're enjoying it. They look sick in their nice clothes. Pasty, ill-fed, drunk on bad coffee, seething."
Charlie LeDuff, US Guys

Style

"A real New Yorker probably doesn't come from New York at all – it's all in the way she thinks and lives. It's all about style – that wonderful, special New York style that makes a true New York girl."
Arnold Scaasi, Women I Have Dressed (and Undressed!)

Always "The" City

"If a New Yorker lives in Great Britain, when he says 'The City,' he's not referring to London."
Sally Mandel, Heart and Soul

Most Attractive People

Dumbo

"The really nice New Yorkers are the most attractive people in America. And one can live so well in New York."
David Graham Phillips, The Fashionable Adventures of Joshua Craig

What New Yorkers Do

Sixth Avenue

"That's what New Yorkers do. They read about other New Yorkers."
Ned Zeman, Vanity Fair

Nosy New Yorkers

East 51st Street

"New Yorkers are nosier than Californians for some reason, probably because they're used to living in closer quarters with more people underfoot in a world of terrifying anonymity, so when they sink their teeth into someone for questioning they go all the way to the bone."
Danielle Steel, Going Home

Interest

Museum of the City of New York

"New Yorkers are mostly interested in New York—in case you haven't noticed."
Jim Harrison, The Morning News

Be and Do Everything

9 West 10th

"New York City [is] the only place where people with nothing behind them but their wits can be and do everything."

Dawn Powell, Remarkable, Unspeakable New York

Monologue

Bryant Park

"New Yorkers don't like to pause. This is not a reflective city. Everyone is too busy. There is a New York 'I'm so busy' monologue. It lasts for ten minutes."
Lily Brett, New York

Around the Clock

Astor Place

"New Yorkers are supposed to be so rude, but I never found that to be true. They were the best I ever saw in this country—people working around the clock, struggling against all odds to survive, and still the pulse for the whole world."
Cher St. John, The Only Things You Ever Really Keep Are the Things You Gave Away

Directions

Chinatown Information Kiosk

"New Yorkers are nice about giving you street directions; in fact they seem quite proud of knowing where they are themselves."
Katherine Brush, quoted in The City